Isaac Asimov

• 1. Introduction

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  Isaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to write. His idea of a pleasant time was climbing to his attic, sitting at his electric typewriter, and banging away while words took shape like magic before his eyes. This was a man who could type a first draft at 90 words per minute, imagine the ending first, then a beginning, and let everything in between work itself out. He was born in Petrovichi, in the Russian SFSR, on a date nobody could pin down, somewhere between October 1919 and January 1920. He arrived in the United States at age three and never learned to swim, ride a bicycle, or comfortably board an airplane. Yet he became one of the "Big Three" of science fiction, alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, and a professor of biochemistry besides. How did an immigrant boy who taught himself to read at five become the writer who gave English the word "robotics"? Why did a man terrified of flying spend his last years lecturing aboard cruise ships? And what made a working scientist decide that fiction, not the laboratory, was his true career?

• 2. The Candy Store Boy

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  Petrovichi gave Asimov his first chapter, and a brush with death. In 1921, he and 16 other children there developed double pneumonia, and only Asimov survived. His parents were Russian Jews, Anna Rachel and Judah Asimov, the son of a miller, and they named the boy Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. The family travelled to the United States via Liverpool aboard the RMS Baltic, arriving on the 3rd of February 1923. His parents spoke Yiddish and English to him but kept Russian as a secret language for when, as he put it, they wanted to discuss something his big ears were not to hear. Brooklyn supplied the rest of his education in reading. After settling in, his parents owned a succession of candy stores where the whole family was expected to work. Those stores sold newspapers and magazines, an unending supply of reading material he could not otherwise have afforded. He began reading science fiction at age nine, persuading his father that magazines with "Science" in the title must be educational. His mother bent the truth to push him ahead. She got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on the 7th of September 1919. In third grade he learned of the error and insisted on an official correction to the 2nd of January, the date he always celebrated. That single correction would later spare him: conscripted into the post-war Army in 1945, he would have been ineligible at 26 had the older date stood.

• 3. Spell It With An S

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  The name Asimov was an accident of spelling. The family name derives from the first part of azimy khleb, meaning winter grain, specifically rye, in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian ending -ov added. When the family reached the United States in 1923 and the name had to be written in the Latin alphabet, his father chose an S, believing the letter sounded like Z as it does in German. Asimov offered readers a trick for saying it. Take three simple English words, has, him, and of, run them together as has-him-of, drop the two h's, and the result is Asimov. The accident later became fiction. He turned the spelling story into a short story called "Spell My Name with an S". He also refused early advice to adopt a more common pseudonym, certain that the very strangeness of his name helped his career. The irony pleased him for the rest of his life. After he grew famous, readers often assumed "Isaac Asimov" was a distinctive pen name invented by an author with an ordinary one.

• 4. The Scientist Who Wrote

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  A scholarship to Seth Low Junior College set Asimov on the path of two careers at once. Graduating from Boys High School in Brooklyn at 15, he spent a few days at City College before taking that scholarship, at a Columbia branch built partly to admit qualified Jewish and Italian-American students turned away by unwritten ethnic quotas. He began as a zoology major, then switched to chemistry after one semester because he disliked dissecting an alley cat. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1939, a master's in chemistry in 1941, and a doctorate in chemistry in 1948. From 1942 to 1945 he worked as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station, where two of his co-workers were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein. His doctoral defense nearly undid him through a joke he had written. In 1948 he published a spoof chemistry article, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", and feared his examiners would think he was not taking science seriously. At the end of his oral exam, one evaluator smiled and asked what he could tell them about the thermodynamic properties of thiotimoline. Asimov laughed so hard with relief that he had to be led from the room, then was summoned back and congratulated as Dr. Asimov. The university and the writer kept an uneasy bargain. He began at Boston University in 1949 on a $5,000 salary, but by 1952 he earned more from writing than from teaching, and eventually stopped research altogether. He was dismissed from his teaching post in December 1957 for lack of research, kept his title after a two-year struggle, and on the 18th of October 1979 was finally promoted to full professor of biochemistry.

• 5. A Word Called Robotics

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  John W. Campbell shaped Asimov before Asimov had sold a thing. On the 17th of May 1938, puzzled by a schedule change at Astounding Science Fiction, he visited its publisher, finished a story called "Cosmic Corkscrew", and personally handed it to Campbell two days later. The editor met with him for more than an hour and then sent a detailed rejection. So began nearly weekly meetings, and a friendship, that ran until Asimov moved to Boston in 1949. His sales started small. He sold his third finished story, "Marooned Off Vesta", to Amazing Stories for $64, one cent a word, and it ran in March 1939. He later said that unlike Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt, whose talent was immediately obvious, he came up only gradually, and that for years no one except perhaps Campbell thought him better than an often published "third rater". Then came the story that changed everything. In March and April 1941 he wrote "Nightfall", his 32nd story, and in 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it the best science fiction short story ever written. He called its writing a watershed, the moment he was suddenly taken seriously. His most lasting gift was a word. In his May 1941 story "Liar!" he coined "robotics", believing he was merely forming the natural analogue of mechanics and hydraulics. In the same story he also coined "positronic". The Oxford English Dictionary credits his fiction with introducing "robotics", "positronic", and "psychohistory" into English, and of those, "robotics" still carries his original meaning in technical use today.

• 6. Empires And Three Laws

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  In 1942 Asimov published the first of his Foundation stories, describing the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the slow building of its successor. They turned on his invented science of psychohistory, a fictional branch combining history, sociology, and statistics to predict the behavior of enormous groups of people. The original trilogy, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, appeared between 1951 and 1953. In 1966 it won the one-time Hugo Award for the all-time best series, and he believed it would be one of his two most enduring contributions. The other contribution governed his robots. His positronic robot stories, many collected in I, Robot in 1950, promulgated a set of rules of ethics, the Three Laws of Robotics, that influenced other writers and thinkers for decades. He noted that he was reacting against the tendency of robots in earlier fiction to fall into a Frankenstein plot and destroy their creators. Decades later he wove these separate worlds into one. With Foundation and Earth in 1986 he linked the distant future of Foundation to his Robot series, building a unified future history, though he admitted many inconsistencies, especially in the older stories. The robots also reached the screen, sometimes by strange routes. Around 1977 Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of I, Robot that Asimov hoped would be the first truly adult science fiction film, but it was never filmed and was published as a book in 1994. The 2004 movie I, Robot, starring Will Smith, came from an unrelated script titled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas added once the rights to his title were acquired.

• 7. The Great Explainer

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  Sputnik turned Asimov from a novelist into a popularizer. After the USSR orbited the first artificial satellite in 1957, he recalled the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did he, seized by a desire to write popular science for a country he feared was neglecting it. Over the next quarter-century he wrote only four science fiction novels and 120 nonfiction books. He published only four adult novels between The Naked Sun in 1957 and Foundation's Edge in 1982. A single magazine column became his signature. The first of 399 monthly columns for Fantasy and Science Fiction appeared in November 1958 and continued until his terminal illness, earning him a reputation as a "Great Explainer". He won his first Hugo Award in 1963 for those essays, and once said that of all his writing, the F&SF articles were by far the most fun. His curiosity refused to stay in one shelf. He wrote 18 popular history books, among them The Greeks: A Great Adventure in 1965 and The Roman Republic in 1966, and produced Asimov's Guide to the Bible across two volumes covering the Old and New Testaments. He was so prolific that his books span every major category of the Dewey Decimal Classification except philosophy and psychology. When Kurt Vonnegut asked how it felt to know everything, Asimov said he only knew how it felt to have the reputation of omniscience: uneasy.

• 8. The Man Behind The Sideburns

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  Asimov was a claustrophile, a man who loved small enclosed spaces. He recalled a childhood wish to own a magazine stand in a New York subway station, where he could shut himself in and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading. He was a teetotaler with a distinct New York accent, of medium height and stocky build, who in later years wore mutton-chop sideburns and switched to bolo ties after his wife Janet objected to his clip-on bow ties. His fear of flying ruled his life. He flew only twice, once for his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station and once returning from Oʻahu in 1946, so he seldom traveled far. That phobia shaped his fiction, including the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. Late in life he found a way to travel without flying, taking enjoyment in cruise ships beginning in 1972, when he watched the Apollo 17 launch from one. His clubs and causes filled the rest. He was a prominent member of the Sherlock Holmes society the Baker Street Irregulars, and a member of the male-only banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which became the basis for his fictional mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. He named Carl Sagan and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky as the only two people he ever met whose intellect he judged greater than his own. He served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1985 until his death, and was succeeded in that role by his friend Kurt Vonnegut. He died in Manhattan on the 6th of April 1992, and was cremated. The cause was reported as heart and kidney failure, but a secret lay behind it. During triple bypass surgery in December 1983 he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, a fact his family kept hidden, and which Janet revealed only a decade after his death in her edition of his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life.